Chris Van Heuveln
Wood Stone Metalwork Motorcycle Enthusiast at Old Mercury
Holly Springs, North Carolina, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolChris Van Heuveln is a seasoned software engineer with over a decade of experience designing and testing network systems, tooling, and open-source modules for Cisco platforms. He contributed substantive fixes and feature additions to the widely used Ansible project—particularly improving NX-OS network modules with better BFD support, timeout handling, and dependency checks. His background spans low-level routing protocol development (EIGRP), virtualization and container orchestration, CI/CD and testbed automation, and customer-facing support and technical writing. A former CCIE R&S, Chris combines deep protocol-level expertise with practical lab-scale engineering—he once managed testbeds with 1000+ devices. In recent years he has retired from professional software work to pursue hands-on craftsmanship in wood, stone, and metalwork while keeping active in motorcycle travel. That uncommon transition from network engineer to maker underscores a pragmatic problem-solver who prefers building tangible things as much as elegant code.
10 years of coding experience
21 years of employment as a software developer
B.S., Computer Science, Math, B.S., Computer Science, Math at University of Maryland University College
Stackoverflow
31reputation
156reached
0answers
1question
Github Skills (12)
nxos10
network-automation10
ansible-galaxy10
python10
networking10
ansible10
testing9
devops8
yaml7
git7
case-insensitive6
puppet6
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
ansible/ansible
Feb 2019 - Jan 2020
Ansible is a radically simple IT automation platform that makes your applications and systems easier to deploy and maintain. Automate everything from code deployment to network configuration to cloud management, in a language that approaches plain English, using SSH, with no agents to install on remote systems. https://docs.ansible.com.
Role in this project:
Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Back-end & DevOps EngineerContributions:77 commits, 66 PRs, 199 comments in 10 months
Contributions summary:Chris primarily contributed to the development and maintenance of the Ansible modules for network devices. Their work focused on fixing bugs in existing modules, specifically related to Cisco's NX-OS platform. The user also implemented new features, such as BFD support and added dependency checks, and improved existing modules' behavior and reliability. Furthermore, the user addressed issues related to the module's interactions with the device, including timeout configurations and error handling, as well as refactoring of the code.
everythingpythonit-automationdevopsdeployment
cisco/cisco-network-puppet-module
Jul 2015 - Aug 2019
Contributions:1 release, 592 commits, 298 PRs in 4 years 1 month
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.